


And the Sun Goes Down

by PoeticallyIrritating



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/F, TW: Blood, TW: Illness, tw: needles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-21
Updated: 2014-04-21
Packaged: 2018-01-20 05:45:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1498852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PoeticallyIrritating/pseuds/PoeticallyIrritating
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cosima and Delphine and betrayal. Again.</p><p>Contains spoilers for 2x01.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And the Sun Goes Down

**Author's Note:**

> One generation passes away, and another generation comes: but the earth stays for ever.  
> The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to his place where he arose.  
> The wind goes toward the south, and turns about to the north; it whirls about continually, and the wind returns again according to his circuits.  
> All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; to the place from where the rivers come, thither they return again.  
> All things are full of labor; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.  
> The thing that has been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.  
> -Ecclesiastes 1:4-9

Cosima’s wrapped up in blankets but suddenly she feels very cold. “You just…had an idea.” Her body wracks with a cough; blood speckles the tissue hastily drawn to her mouth. “Out of the blue.”

“Just let me try this one thing,” says Delphine—wide-eyed, earnest Delphine. Brandishing a vial full of something unknown.

“What is it?”

Delphine opens her mouth. Stops. Starts to speak. “Oh, you know, it’s just—” She stops again.

“You’ve never been a good liar.” Cosima is shaking. (She’s so cold, oh God. She’s from California; she’s not made to weather a Canadian winter. Or a Minnesotan one. She feels a desperate aching, something like homesickness, but she hardens her face, body, mind against it.) “Where did this come from?”

Delphine takes a step back, like Cosima might be dangerous. _Good,_ she thinks. She feels dangerous. She wants to snarl at Delphine’s throat. (She wants to plant kisses along it; she wants to mark it with her teeth.) “ _Delphine_ ,” she says, but her last intake of breath ruined her, and the second half of the name is lost to blood-choked coughing.

Delphine crumples, and suddenly she’s clutching the side of the mattress desperately and her face is large from closeness and she’s saying, “I am so sorry.” Cosima’s stomach lurches with nausea, from the frantic apologies or from the traces of blood that she’s swallowed (she thinks about it churning around in her stomach and feels sicker, almost runs for the bathroom). Maybe from both. “I just wanted to help you! You could be dying.” Delphine looks horrified at herself, draws back.

“You don’t need to be afraid of saying it,” says Cosima—bitterly, maybe. Or maybe that’s the taste of blood staining her lips. “I’m not getting any better, am I?”

“But you _could._ Cosima, they want to help you, really. I did this for you. To protect you!”

Cosima’s laugh comes out hollow. “You know, I’m having the weirdest feeling of déjà vu.” Delphine’s mouth opens and closes, fishlike, and Cosima feels an unexpected surge of disgust. “Get out,” she says, and her mouth is full of metal.

But it is nothing like the last time because Delphine says _“no”_ firmly and again and again, like a mantra. “I don’t love you,” says Cosima, hard and sharp, spitting out the lie like it’ll burn if it lingers too long on her tongue, and Delphine trills, high and desperate, “I don’t _care!”_

She feels cold again. Gasping. “What?”

Delphine’s chest is rising and falling: frantic, but in a regular kind of rhythm that Cosima has learned to envy. “I just want you to live,” she says. “Everything else is—is secondary.”

Cosima’s throat burns with the beginning of tears. “Get away,” she says, low. She can see the hurt in Delphine’s eyes and some twisted part of her thinks, _good._ “Just get back;” and she does: Delphine retreats to a chair on the other side of the room and pulls her knees to her chest, compressing long limbs into a small space. Cosima tugs at the pillows at her back, shoving them into the head of the bed until they’re vertical enough that she can sit up a little higher. Delphine jerks forward in her chair but the motion, the urge to help, is quickly aborted.

Cosima closes her eyes against it all but she can still hear the sound of Delphine’s breathing, smell the hints of perfume that always linger in the air around her. She feels like she’s suffocating under the force of the coughs she keeps suppressing, the blood bubbling up in her throat and being forced back down.

“You promised,” she says, cold, and she wants to sob and cough and her chest is burning but she crosses her arms over her chest and makes her face stone. “I thought we were, like, building something,” she says, and it’s getting harder and harder not to cry. “I was trying so hard to learn to trust you again.” She stops—waits—but Delphine says nothing. “How could you do this to me?”

“Because I love you!” Delphine jerks a hand in front of her mouth, looking horrified with herself.

Cosima freezes. “You what?”

Delphine tugs her lower lip between her teeth before speaking again. When she does, it’s low and earnest and breathless. “I _love you._ I do. More than—than I have every loved somebody, I think. And I could not bear the thought of—of losing you.”

Cosima jerks her head away from Delphine’s wide longing eyes. Something awful and dark is churning inside of her. “So you lied to me, again.” She stares hard at the wall, emphatically _not_ looking at Delphine. “You took away the one thing I have control over in this whole mess.” Her jaw tightens. “My body doesn’t even belong to me, but I thought I still had this.”

“Cosima, look—look at me!” (She turns her head slowly, unwillingly, back.) “You have been searching all this time but you’re not even close. And I can give this to you, right now, and maybe it will work. We have a chance!”

The vial is resting next to Delphine on the vanity. “Give it to me,” Cosima says, and Delphine starts. She uncurls herself and picks up the vial and syringe, walking over to Cosima like she’s approaching a wild animal. Cosima holds out her hand.

“You are _not_ administering this to yourself.”

“Watch me,” Cosima hisses, but even as she speaks her hand is trembling.

“You are not trained,” says Delphine steadily, “and you are not healthy.” She’s all business now, rolling up her sleeves and pulling a bag of supplies from her purse: gloves, cotton balls, a tiny bottle of 70% alcohol. She pulls on the gloves.

Cosima’s arms are still across her chest, fingernails digging into her upper arms. She unclenches, slowly, and relinquishes her left arm to Delphine’s reaching hands—hands all covered in latex gloves and at first it doesn’t feel like Delphine touching her at all. But the tenderness in her fingers is unlike any nurse Cosima’s ever known; she twitches at the lightness of it. (“Are you all right?” asks Delphine, and Cosima, tonelessly, says, “no.”) She relaxes her muscles, consciously releasing the tension from her arms and hands. “Go ahead.”

The alcohol swab is cool on the inside of her elbow, and she grits her teeth against the needle going in, against the painful pressure beneath her skin as Delphine pushes down the plunger. A tickle starts in her chest and her right hand scrabbles at the bedclothes, reaching for a handkerchief, a tissue, anything—“tissue,” she gasps, but both of Delphine’s hands are occupied, and at the last moment Cosima drags her arm away in time to paint her palms with hacked-up blood. It drips down her wrists and as she reaches for a handkerchief she realize she’s bleeding somewhere else, too: it’s trickling red down her arm from where the needle was wrenched out. It fills the creases on her palm, welling in the center, dripping onto her pants and the bed. She’s paralyzed.

Delphine dabs at her hands with a handkerchief, the dark blue cloth growing darker with the blood. Cosima pulls her hands away. She wipes roughly at the blood herself, smearing it against her skin, and her arms are covered in red all over and there are bloodstains on her pants and she coughs again, raggedly, into the already bloodied cloth.

Everything is blood. Cosima’s never been much for poetic hyperbole but she feels like she’s _drowning_ in it. (Kinda is. Drowning is basically just fluid collecting in your lungs, right? Here she is, then. Drowning.) She scrubs frantically at her arms but  it’s just getting redder, and her arm is still bleeding from the injection site and Delphine grabs her hands in her gloved ones and holds tight. The syringe, half-full and blood-tipped, is sitting on the bedside table. “Let me just finish administering the medicine,” she says, and it sounds like begging. Cosima keeps losing her breath before she can speak. She can’t stop looking at the blood on her hands. The blood on her pants. Blood all over and Delphine doesn’t even seem to notice. It feels like a horror movie—“Didn’t you see that?” “See what?” and Cosima is left gasping.

“Cosima,” Delphine says softly, gloved hand reaching for her arm again. Cosima looks up hoping to see something besides blood, and Delphine hits her in waves: wide watery eyes and deflating blond curls and the smell of her, something past the perfume. It smells like home and it smells nothing like home (home is city grime and marijuana and the faint salty smell of the bay, home is _safe_ , home is people who keep their promises). She’s almost surprised when tears burn at her eyes, but then her chest is shaking and she’s crying loud, messy sobs. She collapses and where she ends up is Delphine.


End file.
